Thread 9: To feel disappointed after reading this in The Observer about the author and her husband from The Salt Path book and film?

[DisappointedReader]

The Observer The real Salt Path: how a blockbuster book and film were ...

2nd Observer https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-salt-path-whats-in-the-book-and-what-the-observer-has-found

3rd Observer https://observer.co.uk/news/national/article/the-salt-path-the-truth-behind-the-blockbuster-book-video

4th Observer ‘I felt I was being gaslit’ – the landlord who helped Ray...

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Raynor Winn/Sally Walker's statement Raynor Winn

New posters welcome. It would be helpful to read at least the four Observer items above before posting.

To all - Please be extremely cautious when it comes to naming or implicating people and addresses not in the public eye or with no direct connection to the story, and around the understandable health speculations, especially where details are unclear or still emerging. Please do not engage with visitors who seem to have their own agenda and seek to derail. Avoid @'ing and quoting them as this will only encourage them back to the threads.

We have done amazingly well together - in the main that is, not mentioning any names but you know who you are! - for eight threads so far. I can't be on the threads as much as I'd like so all help with keeping our discussion ticking along in a healthy and civil fashion is very welcome.

No saltiness. Keep to the path. Thank you.

Going purely from Landlines a lot seems to be about Ray’s perception of his illness. Moth injuries his finger/hand on a sleeping bag “take your ring off at least, it’s going to swell” Moth says “it hurt for a moment but it’s ok now”. Ray suggests hospital if finger broken. Ray says “obviously there are some benefits to losing the feeling in his hands’.

Her slightly cryptic remark about being in Scotland 35 years ago. A wedding anniversary she forgets to is put down to his progressive memory loss. I am wondering if there’s a pattern to all this but keeping an open mind.

I think there’s definitely something in that. She keeps talking in TWS about not being able to trust people because they’d been so betrayed before — the offer of the tenancy on the cider farm is described purely in terms of whether they can trust Bill Cole. Which makes sense if you’d believed they lost their home because of their overly trusting nature, but reads very differently if you believe SW was the one who betrayed a trust, and then they both perpetrated a form of well-remunerated literary hoax.

I've just speed read the first few chapters of my print copy, bought last week second hand from Amazon, and it's not in there. It's a film edition but is a reprint of the 2019 paperback edition, ie the text should be identical. Sorry @AlertCat but I think with so many versions of the narrative around 😵‍💫 you're probably thinking of something you've read elsewhere. However, the Independent article does say it..

Another discrepancy: was browsing in shops today and picked up a copy of The Wild Silence. The back cover blurb says they got the diagnosis, did the walk etc in 2016. Thought it was 2013? What's that about? Photo below

Idle speculation again… maybe they can’t buy a house because there are still unpaid debts and they’re liable. Occam’s Razor?

@PullTheBricksDown someone at penguin getting confused!? That barely even fits with the 2015 consultant’s letter!

Fingers crossed no big global event requiring pages of Observer cover happens between now and Sunday as I want to see Chloe’s follow up.

Is anyone going to the focus event?

@Choux is it in person in London, or on zoom?

An interesting article from the Guardian about Hannah Ingram Moore with emphasis on the 'grifter to guru' narrative which has echoes of the WalkerWinns.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/22/grifter-guru-hannah-ingram-moore-tiktok-reinvention-inspiration-all

Very interesting. Ray sounds like a raging hypochondriac bit of a nightmare. It's almost like she's trying to use Moth to construct storylines for her book, but obviously I'm sure that's not the case at all just in case the RayMoth's lawyers are reading this.

I watched this from about 7 mins in - she seems more forthcoming than sometimes. Seems it was Mars bars back in the day .....

Hannah Moore working on a TikTok reinvention? What is wrong with these people? How are they so entitled not utterly mortified.

Surely you'd pat yourself on the back for getting away with it for as long as you did and FTFO into obscurity.

I'd say self appointed guru = grifter = narcissist, personally. These people all seem to have the same traits. Mostly attention seeking at others expense. Elderly fathers, sick husbands etc. To me, it borders on Munchausens by proxy, and also the trait that pathological liars have of actually believing their own lies.

ETA: Also Jack Monroe

I think the diagnosis haunts her, which I empathise about, but it also seemingly leads to hyper vigilance:” I hold my breath expecting him to wake up feeling worse not better”.

No sense of irony as well as a lack of conscience. The WalkerWinns have pulled off an incredible moneymaking scheme and there's probably no way they'll lose their millions, unless Penguin sue them but that's unlikely.

@RainbowZebraWarrior that's just what was going through my mind. Gives you an extra importance, the sicker the sick person is, the more important and needed you are. Which is presumably what goes on with that syndrome I am guessing?

(Edited to add) Not suggesting there is no illness here, but obviously the more severe the condition, the more significance the patient/carer will attain

Me too. I'm convinced i read something about Moth being involved in a eco-protest in TSP yet I cannot find any reference to it when I've searched the online book. Very perplexing!

This could well be subtly referenced in TSP when RW wrote the farm was their island and they could shut themselves away from the world. It comes at the bit where she talks about how awful it would be to get a council house so close to the farm and how they'd be the talk of the village.

This blurb is on the PRH website too. I picked up on it but reasoned it was just very sloppy copy writing/editing. It does show, however, how they don't really care about getting the timeline right.

That's my thinking about not buying a house. Though could also be they have enough coming in to comfortably rent and that gives them an easy way of moving on quickly. Or they are traumatised from home ownership- regardless of how they lost the farm, they still lost it.

Bookery interview
"I’d just met an unbelievably beautiful young man who had exploded into my life in a long army trench-coat and riding boots, his long hair a mat of blond, eco-warrior mystery...
I ran away and married my eco-warrior and over thirty years later we’re still living life on our own terms."
Or were you looking for the name Moth being linked to Eco activism? I've definitely seen the word socialism somewhere

Strangely in the Penguin interview Moth states how he has to repeat an action: “My memory is starting to go now so I do read The Salt Path, over and over,” Moth tells me.

...the trait that pathological liars have of actually believing their own lies

I find this so, so interesting.

My DM is very much of this mindset personality disorder and will distort reality to fit her narrative; I've witnessed her bending truth into fiction.

From a psychological perspective, the sheer guts of twisting the truth the way she has takes something 'else'. Or something is missing. Empathy perhaps.

It's just so ridiculously hypocritical , when SW tries to project the whole 'child of nature' image.

This juxtaposition is why it's so compelling, perhaps?

Hmm. Has anyone got a paper copy of TSP, by any chance? I do, but am away at the moment so can’t check it.

In my memory the passage goes like this:

”something something my husband Moth- real name Ray, Moth is a nickname from his eco warrior days in the 80s”

My copy of TWS has the same blurb referencing 2016. To keep the set for checking purposes, I am tempted to contact the person who bought my TSP on Vinted and ask for it back so I can settle my curiosity about that Moth/Ray thing. Is that taking pedantry and a quest for minute accuracy too far, though?

Edited to remove the juxtaposition of two sentences whose relationship to each other was still inside my head.

I found what I'd been thinking of. But still no mention of "Ray".

The first time I saw Moth across the sixth-form college canteen I was eighteen. He was wearing a white collarless shirt as he dipped a Mars bar in a cup of tea. I was mesmerized. Afterwards, hanging out of the third-floor window with my friends, we watched him walk through the grounds: old army trench coat flapping in the wind, riding boots up to his knees. I couldn’t think of anything else. Weeks passed before he spoke to me, weeks of hiding, watching from a distance, behind bookshelves, in shop doorways, in the bushes. All I could think about was him. And sex. Then he spoke to me, and it seemed that was all he thought of too.
A teenage crush grew into a friendship that had us running in the grasp of its passion through adult life. A life I hadn’t known existed, down roads I would never have taken, through days on wind-scoured moors, weeks of screaming resistance at CND rallies, music festivals and pizzas in the park, as he swept me into his eco-warrior life, and talking, talking, talking, in a conversation without end. Years passed with our legs entwined, in endless chatter and laughter. While our friends changed their relationships with their clothes, we needed nothing else. Through our thirties and forties, we watched as couples around us fell into a grey state of companionship, defining themselves by their Saturdays spent shopping or watching the match, and fizzling inevitably into break-ups. And all the time we lived with a passion that didn’t die.

Pass me the bucket please...not the sump oil one though.

The poor soul!
Admittedly I've never read TSP but the extracts PP have posted have made my teeth itch at how badly written they are. The thought of having to read them over and over like endless purgatory is not an enviable one.